61–70 of 136 posts
The joys of mandatory obsolescence. Forcing handset churn is environmentally irresponsible. Maybe it is time for landlines to get SMS so people don't have to rely on mobile infrastructure? 5am sentiment but it'd be nice.
Landlines are being taken away by 2025.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won’t say parking meters are critical!
They are to the companies or local administrations making money from them. City councils have some leverage on mobile operators by the means of national governments. In general, each industry or other organizations hit by changes will be vocal against those changes. Countries implement them when everybody is OK with them or when the organizations not OK with them are politically too weak to matter.
In a harsh environment (war, crisis, epidemic…) you can give up paying the parking but you still need to eat. This is critical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won’t say parking meters are critical!
They are to the companies or local administrations making money from them. City councils have some leverage on mobile operators by the means of national governments. In general, each industry or other organizations hit by changes will be vocal against those changes. Countries implement them when everybody is OK with them or when the organizations not OK with them are politically too weak to matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Critical systems are using or will fallback to 2G, which will stay with us forever. The bandwidth is not required there anyway.
2G services were shut down in Australia back in 2016-2017.
Has 4G/5G improved? When I lived in the UK (Midlands until 2019) it was entirely unreliable. I'd wager 75% of my connection was on 3G as soon as I was more than 3Km from a town's high street. I can say with confidence that the shift from 4G/LTE to 5G where I live now in British Columbia (Canada) mountains is not fun. It's significantly less reliable. I understand that its 10x faster, but I'd much prefer reliable over…
Recently visited South Yorkshire for the first time in 4 years. I didn’t notice a big difference between 3 and 4G coverage, but it was shocking how much of the city area has complete coverage blackspots. Both for myself connected to EE and a friend connected to Vodafone.
> Furthermore, the study also reveals 21% of those with a 3G handset aren’t willing to upgrade, and will simply continue to use their phone without internet connectivity. Seems reasonable. Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
Some devices are very hard or expensive to replace. EV: car infotainment systems.
3G has been recently switched off in the most (or all by now?) part of Hungary. I have thought that the bands get reused for 4G, but no change so far. Probably the remaining 2G occupies the same bands or whatever. Or they have gone with 5G, while all the providers banish prepaid users from using 5G, so thanks for nothing. Anyway, the biggest downside is that where the 4G coverage sucks, I'm seeing the nightmarish EDG…
The joys of mandatory obsolescence. Forcing handset churn is environmentally irresponsible. Maybe it is time for landlines to get SMS so people don't have to rely on mobile infrastructure? 5am sentiment but it'd be nice.
Many years ago, Sprint used to have a "text to landline" feature on their network. You could send an SMS from your phone and then their server would dial the landline and use a speech synthesizer to read out the text.
The joys of mandatory obsolescence. Forcing handset churn is environmentally irresponsible. Maybe it is time for landlines to get SMS so people don't have to rely on mobile infrastructure? 5am sentiment but it'd be nice.
Many years ago, Sprint used to have a "text to landline" feature on their network. You could send an SMS from your phone and then their server would dial the landline and use a speech synthesizer to read out the text.
At one point BT hired Tom Baker to use his voice on their TTS system. I'm sure more people would use it if they kept his voice: https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw